View - ResearchGate

224 Socially Intelligent Agentsagent. This frequent guidance from the drama manager will be complicatedby the fact that low-bandwidth guidance (such as giving a believable agenta new goal) will interact strongly with the moment-by-moment internal stateof the agent, such as the set of currently active goals and behaviors, leadingto surprising, and usually unwanted, behavior. In order to reliably guide anagent, the scene-level drama manager will have to engage in higher-bandwidthguidance involving the active manipulation of internal agent state (e.g. editingthe currently active goal tree). Authoring strongly autonomous characters forstory-worlds is not only extra, unneeded work (given that scene-level guidancewill need to intervene frequently), but actively makes guidance more difficult,in that the drama manager will have to compensate for the internal decisionmakingprocesses (and associated state) of the agent.As the drama manager provides guidance, it will often be the case that themanager will need to carefully coordinate multiple characters so as to make thenext story event happen. For example, it may be important for two characters toargue in such a way as to conspire towards the revelation of specific informationat a certain moment in the story. To achieve this with autonomous agents,one could try to back away from the stance of strong autonomy and providespecial goals and behaviors within the individual agents that the drama managercan activate to create coordinated behavior. But even if the character authorprovides these special coordination hooks, coordination is still being handledat the individual goal and behavior level, in an ad-hoc way. What one reallywants is a way to directly express coordinated character action at a level abovethe individual characters.At this point the assumptions made by an interactive drama architectureconsisting of a drama manager guiding strongly autonomous agents have beenfound problematic. The next section presents a sketch of a plot and characterarchitecture that addresses these problems.4. Integrating Plot and Character with the Dramatic BeatIn dramatic writing, stories are thought of as consisting of events that turn(change) values ([14]). A value is a property of an individual or relationship,such as trust, love, hope (or hopelessness), etc. A story event is precisely anyactivity that turns a value. If there is activity – characters running around, lotsof witty dialog, buildings and bridges exploding, and so on – but this activityis not turning a value, then there is no story event, no dramatic action. Thusone of the primary goals of an interactive drama system should be to make surethat all activity turns values. Of course these values should be changed in sucha way as to make some plot arc happen that enacts the story premise, such asin our case, "To be happy you must be true to yourself".